Does the Dust Bowl stack up to today's disasters?

Jan. 28, 2013
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The huge Black Sunday storm strikes the Church of Good in Ulysses, Kansas, 1935. The heart of the Dust Bowl covered more than 100 million acres in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. / Historic Adobe Museum

by Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

by Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

As disastrous as this year's drought has been - with up to 65% of the USA enduring drought conditions at one point in mid-September and likely billions of dollars in crop losses - it can't really compare to the decade-long tragedy of the Dust Bowl.

How bad was the drought of the 1930s? "The Dust Bowl belongs on the list of the top three, four, or five environmental catastrophes in world history," according to historian Donald Worster of the University of Kansas.

A combination of factors, including government incentives and several unusually wet years, led farmers to plant much of the region with wheat in the 1920s. A shortsighted and ill-advised farming practice - known as "the Great Plow-up" - occurred when farmers essentially gouged out huge swaths of topsoil to plant their wheat.

"People moved in and changed the ecosystem that had been there for thousands or millions of years," says climatologist Brian Fuchs of the National Drought Mitigation Center.

And then, when the rains stopped in the '30s, as is common in the area, massive dust storms sucked up the newly plowed earth, often turning day into night.

Comparing it to this year's drought, Fuchs says that while we're approaching the intensity of what we saw during the peak drought years of the 1930s, it's the decade-long duration of the Dust Bowl that sets it apart.

Climate change is also leading to speculation that drought could be the new normal - that droughts like this year's will be common in the central and western USA in the years and decades ahead. But how quickly we forget: Just last year, much of the central U.S. endured flooding unlike anything in recorded history, with both the Mississippi and Missouri River basins swamped to near-all-time record levels.

Both the Mississippi and Missouri River floods of 2011 were multibillion-dollar disasters, the National Climatic Data Center reported. Crazily, just a few hundred miles to the west, Texas last year endured one of its worst droughts on record, which has eased somewhat this year.

So while climate change may eventually lead to more droughts, it's these wild swings of weather extremes that could be more common now and in the years ahead, according to a report earlier this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report found that drought-causing heat waves, floods and other extreme weather are all expected to worsen with global warming.

Some of the incredible facts about the Dust Bowl:

-- The heart of the Dust Bowl covered more than 100 million acres in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas.

-- More than 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in a single year.

-- As many as a quarter-million Americans were driven from their homes.

-- At one point in July 1934, 80% of the USA was in a drought, the highest percentage ever recorded.